Primary School 9/3/2026
As mentioned in the Massachusetts preview, the paywall is going to start going up on previews and PAC Trackers shortly, so subscribe now if you want to keep getting those.
Massachusetts results
Massachusetts was chock-full of close-but-not-quite results for progressive primary challengers, including a particularly impressive 54-46 loss for high school teacher Jeromie Whalen's progressive challenge to Rep. Richie Neal, which never got buy-in from national progressive groups and still managed to give the congressman the closest primary of his career, something national progressive groups are sure to notice as they plot a 2028 strategy. Conservative Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch survived a primary from attorney Patrick Roath by a somewhat better margin, but still lost the city of Boston and showed real vulnerability in its suburbs; future challengers shouldn't be deterred by this year's result. Further down the ballot, incumbents largely survived in the state legislature as well—with the notable exception of Senate majority whip Mike Rush, who lost his Boston-based district to progressive consumer protection attorney Persis Yu. However, open seats were, broadly speaking, a disaster for moderates and for state House leadership; most open races went to candidates running to the left with the backing of progressive groups, from high-profile races like democratic socialist Erika Uyterhoeven's victory over Gov. Maura Healey-endorsed state Rep. Christine Barber for a Somerville-area state Senate seat to lower-profile races in rural western Massachusetts and the Boston suburbs. (One race remains undecided, and it's a big one: Senate President Pro Tempore Will Brownsberger trails progressive challenger Daniel Lander by three votes, 12,132 to 12,129, as I write this.)
CA-34
As a House Ethics Committee probe looms over Rep. Jimmy Gomez, some organizations are taking a second look at his Justice Democrats-backed challenger Angela Gonzales-Torres. Gonzales-Torres, a neighborhood councilor and progressive activist, won the support of two major groups this week—one local, one national. First came the national help: David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve, which has by this point spent for quite a few candidates at the state and federal level, decided to back Gonzales-Torres’s challenge to the congressman for downtown Los Angeles. Then, Gonzales-Torres won the endorsement of DSA-LA through a vote of the organization's membership, giving her access to the chapter’s impressive field operation, which has felled several LA City Councilmembers since 2020. (Gonzales-Torres faces Gomez in an all-Democrat November runoff; Gomez has had close calls against less-funded Democratic challenges from the left before, without the help of an ethics scandal to drive his numbers down.)
Los Angeles Mayor
Gonzales-Torres’s endorsement wasn’t the major headline from the DSA-LA endorsement vote, though. That was the organization’s endorsement of Councilmember Nithya Raman’s challenge to Mayor Karen Bass—the latest twist in Raman’s on-again-off-again relationship with DSA-LA, which backed her in her initial run for council but grew quite chilly towards her as Raman showed more of a moderate streak than DSA-LA’s other elected officials. The organization declined to endorse her in the first round of the mayoral election in favor of neutrality due to the presence of a second DSA candidate, Rae Huang, who was less viable but had a less fraught relationship with the organization. (DSA-LA’s city councilmembers outright endorsed Bass, a disastrous moderate, in a fit of pique after Raman launched her campaign.) Now, faced with a binary choice between Bass and Raman, about two-thirds of DSA-LA members have voted to endorse Raman, enough to give Raman the endorsement and place Raman at the head of a unified left slate to take control of Los Angeles city government.
NH-Sen
A new poll, albeit from notoriously erratic UNH, finds something shocking in New Hampshire’s Senate primary: Rep. Chris Pappas’s lead has narrowed considerably, if the poll is to be believed. Leftist scientist Karishma Manzur trails Pappas 47%-34% in the new poll, a dramatic shift from earlier polls showing Manzur trailing Pappas by much wider margins—though the trend in UNH’s polls has been consistently upward for Manzur; she trailed 53%-29% in June and 61%-18% in April.
NH-01
That same UNH poll finds that the race to succeed Pappas in the House is a crapshoot on the Democratic side of the aisle. Two centrists, veteran Maura Sullivan and former Portsmouth City Councilor Stefany Shaheen, lead the pack with 24% and 19%, while progressive Hampton Select Board member Carleigh Beriont trails with 11%. The poll also finds democratic socialist state Rep. Heath Howard at 10%—and notes that the poll was conducted prior to Howard’s withdrawal and endorsement of Beriont, which obviously should scramble the race and might give Beriont, who seems to be surging, a chance to consolidate the progressive vote. To that end, Beriont won the endorsement of UAW Region 9A, a staunchly left-leaning federation of UAW locals that represents mostly grad student workers and nonprofit employees—including grad student workers at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, one of the larger sources of Democratic votes in this district.
Meanwhile, Shaheen, the daughter of retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, is calling in all the help she can get from her powerful mother—most recently the endorsement of New Hampshire’s other US senator, Maggie Hassan. In response, Sullivan is attacking Shaheen as a nepo baby, an attack which is, well, true. She is in fact a senator's daughter getting help from her senator mother as she attempts to win a congressional seat. Getting attacked as a nepo baby is the price of admission when that's your biography, even if the opponent making the attack is a party insider herself. (Sullivan, a Marine veteran, is a former candidate for this same seat and a current vice-chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party; her current run is backed extensively by centrist, veteran-focused PACs like VoteVets and the Servant-Leader Fund.)
Brooklyn Democratic Party
In June, reformers won enough district leader seats on the Kings County Democratic Committee to oust controversial party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, an assemblywoman from Flatbush aligned with the party’s notoriously corrupt old guard figures like Frank Seddio and the late Vito Lopez. This would wrest control of New York’s largest county Democratic Party from the state’s vaunted system of machine politics and into the hands of good-government-minded reformers friendly to the left. The practical consequences of such a move should be mostly limited to better and fairer use of party resources and a more open judicial selection process (political parties pick judges in New York, because the Big Apple doesn’t do subtlety.) However, Bichotte Hermelyn’s response has all but guaranteed there will be broader repercussions from the Brooklyn Democratic civil war: she rigged the vote to save her job as party chair, adding enough new voters to the committee which selects the party chair to override the duly-elected district leaders who had campaigned on ousting her. Bichotte Hermelyn’s move allowed her to narrowly defeat the reformers’ pick, Sunset Park district leader Julio Peña III; the reformers, unsurprisingly, are suing—though the judges they have to convince have been selected by none other than Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn’s Brooklyn Democratic Party. Bichotte Hermelyn then released an utterly deranged video that I just want you to see for yourself; in it, she misspells Brooklyn and refers to herself as “unshakened.”
Bichotte Hermelyn’s move actually spurred rare condemnations from her usual allies, like Gov. Kathy Hochul and state party chair Jay Jacobs. There is also a growing expectation that somebody on the left (whether it’s DSA, the non-DSA reformers, or a coalition candidate) will take a shot at Bichotte Hermelyn’s Flatbush Assembly seat, a gentrifying chunk of Brooklyn which voted for Zohran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo in both the 2025 mayoral primary and that year’s general election rematch. Another Bichotte Hermelyn ally and foe of the Brooklyn left, Hakeem Jeffries, has been uncharacteristically silent—but with two close allies of Mamdani, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander, set to take over Brooklyn congressional seats in January, it makes sense that the House Democratic leader isn’t expending much political capital to defend Bichotte Hermelyn from a crisis of her own making.
